Play «Quân Khu Nam Đồng» (Nam Dong Military Quarter)

   A courtyard in a Hanoi army housing block in the early 1970s: fathers at the front, mothers holding the household together, and teenagers growing up between air-raid sirens and football games on the shared yard. The staging rebuilds that yard, and reaches for laughter before it reaches for tears.

   Every family in the block is in the same position, waiting for news of a husband or a father and leaning on one another. The play follows the children of that yard: they fight, form gangs, fall in love for the first time and share every scrap of news that comes back from the front, and the comedy of adolescence runs alongside the silences that fall when death reaches the estate.

   The script was adapted by writer and screenwriter Phạm Ngọc Tiến from the novel of the same name by Bình Ca — the book that turned the name Nam Đồng into shorthand for a whole generation of soldiers' children. The director is the theatre's own head, Merited Artist Nguyễn Sĩ Tiến.

   Who and what is behind the production:

• — People's Artist Đỗ Doãn Bằng designed the set: rows of state housing, a peeling wall, the windswept common yard
• — Merited Artist Phùng Tiến Minh wrote the score, plain melodies carrying a lot of memory
• — The cast includes Merited Artists Thanh Bình and Quang Ánh, Lương Thu Trang, Thu Quỳnh, Thanh Sơn, Nguyễn Tú and Chí Huy, close to thirty performers in all
• — Bùi Đăng Văn staged the fight scenes for the schoolboys' brawls

   The play works for two audiences at once. If you know Hanoi's collective housing from the inside, you will recognise the yard immediately; if you are a visitor, this is a rare look at how the war years felt for the families left behind, told without slogans.

   There are two performances in this run, on 23 August and 6 September, both in the evening. The theatre does not admit children under 13 to this play, and latecomers past 30 minutes are not seated. The play is performed in Vietnamese, without subtitles, and it leans heavily on dialogue.

   Come for a Hanoi story told in an everyday voice, by the company that has been telling stories to young audiences since 1978.